Probably the most pervasive system for printer discovery – at least in
the SOHO market – is Apple’s Bonjour. It’s based on mDNS, which
provides decentralized name announcement and resolution. DNS-SD is
layered on top of mDNS to provide a mechanism for service discovery. By
their powers combined, clients can find services provided by other nodes
on their local network (i.e. networked printers) without needing a
central directory or any manual configuration. Apple has published a
standard for how network printers should advertise themselves.

VMware Fusion offers the ability to share OS X’s printers with guest
OSes via its ThinPrint driver, but that often doesn’t support the more
advanced options of business-grade printers and copy machines. Most
Linux distributions use the C UNIX Printing System (CUPS), which is also
used by OS X. CUPS is inherently networked even when working within a
single machine, so it’s fairly simple to set up a Linux guest to print
to the OS X host’s CUPS server.

When the topic of profanity filtering comes up on forums or other
community sites, it is nearly always discussed in terms of whether or
not filtering is censorship. That framing produces much acrimony and
little useful discussion. This is my response to one such thread. By the
time I had written it the discussion had devolved into ad hominem
attacks and been closed by a moderator, so I’ve chosen to post it here
instead.

I accidentally left my mobile phone at a friend’s a while ago, and I
needed temporary phone service until I could get it back. Since I use
Google Voice, forwarding calls to another number is easy. I thought a
prepaid mobile phone would be an ideal solution. I’d use it for a few
days, then when I got my phone back I could just stop using it and the
unused balance would stick around until I needed it. I had an old
Android phone from Sprint lying around, so rather than get a new prepaid
phone I decided to activate it with Boost Mobile, Sprint’s prepaid
division. That seemed like an especially good idea since I already had
the phone and CDMA doesn’t need a SIM card, so I could sign up on the
web without needing to go anywhere or get anything shipped to me.

I just finished installing Windows 8 drivers for all the hardware in my
new laptop. One device in particular, ACPI\VEN_ATK&DEV_4001, stumped
me for quite a while. There’s no open, centralized database for ACPI IDs
like there is for PCI and USB. All I knew was
that it was made by Asus (ATK is their vendor code) and searching Google
was turning up nothing. I eventually resorted to looking at the ini
files from random drivers on the Asus site for the UX31A until I found a
match. Apparently it’s the wireless radio control interface, used to
enter airplane mode from the Windows UI. It’s covered by the “ASUS
Wireless Radio Control” driver in the “Utilities” section of
the download page.

I recently bought myself an Asus ZenBook UX31A.
I upgraded the OS to Windows 8 Pro. After I installed BIOS update 212,
I stopped being able to get into the BIOS setup menu. I would press F2
during the POST screen just like before, but it would just boot straight
into Windows. I’m pretty sure the BIOS update was a coincidence.

Based on the discussion in JIM-254 I’m extending the JIRA
Importers Plugin (JIM) to support RT. I was trying to start
JIRA for testing with atlas-run -DskipTests, but after the initial
setup process it failed to load with this error message: